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Purchased Domain Not Related to Vertical and Moved Questions

We used to reside on a longer domain name character wise but had an opportunity to purchase a three letter acronym before my time. We advertise heavily on TV and other traditional media channels so it was simpler for individuals to remember.

After purchasing this domain we moved over from the old one to the new one. We followed all of your standard protocols (301s, change of address in Webmaster Tools, new sitemap, etc, etc.) Google and Bing both index the new site and there isn't a significant issue there but we're having incredible difficulty in ranking for any of our core terms.

We're the largest company in our space but continue to rank for terms that have nothing to do with our vertical. This is due to the fact that the site used to be owned by a company that is completely separate from ours. The site that we have today contains none of the old content but it does have links pointing to it from similar sites from that vertical.

Bing was incredibly helpful and had indicated it's these links that's potentially causing us the issue in that search engines are seeing two different verticals over time on a domain. It's been a year since this took place and it seems that the only recommendation is to contact the non related sites to remove links or disavow. Bing had indicated that disavowing was not as relevant as getting the links removed.

2 Responses

"Bing had indicated that disavowing was not as relevant as getting the links removed"

If you think the links are causing your issues and request them to to disavowed, they will be.

It's very hard to give any advice without viewing the URL. There could be any number of factors affecting the site such as thin content, poor backend SEO keyword choices, poorly written descriptions, etc etc. Could you please provide the URL? If it's a privacy issue with the company or client, please send me a PM with the URL for additional advice.

Sure. The URL is www.aag.com. Our old domain used to be www.aagreverse.com. The disavow was somewhat new to me as well but Bing had indicated, 'Disavow won't change how the algo sees the relationship. Its a hint as to the webmasters intentions, not an on/off switch'. So it sounds like disavow is fine to do but at least with Bing they're looking for the links to be removed as well. Please let me know if you need anything else.

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